Sexual Masochism IV

In the made for tv movie Between Friends (1983) Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor play bitches that you come to understand and sympathize with. Like the bitches in Dolores Claybourne, you become acquainted with their individual struggles, and their reasons for being so pissed off all the time slowly become clear.

Carol plays a woman who had a repressive, religious upbringing by nuns. She marries Mr. Wrong, and after her divorce she has a string of meaningless affairs with a series of Mr. Wrong Guys. Finally she tells Elizabeth that she's not going to do that anymore. "No more nuns to shock, you know".

I see this as a key to understanding masochism, and self-destructive behaviour in general. The fact that she wouldn't have dated Mr. Wrong if it were not to "shock the nuns" means it was never the men themselves she was interested in. If she could have acted freely she would have made different choices, but she wasn't free, she felt the compulsion to make the kind of wrong choices the nuns would have disapproved of. Even though at this point they were no longer a part of her life, the memory of them acted as an inner demon. You could say what turned her on sexually were not the men, but the nuns.

Why did she feel compelled to act this way? The nuns could do her no harm anymore. She didn't agree with them, so their opinion had no personal value to her. Even if they knew what she was doing and disapproved of it, it's not like they could do anything about it anymore. Carol was a free adult, who could do whatever she liked. The reason she still felt the need to "shock the nuns" was because she still wasn't over her enormous anger at what they did to her -- maybe because when she was a child they were the most powerful people in her life, they had her at their mercy.

It makes me think of Richard Gere's character in Pretty Woman: he says he went to a shrink, because he was very angry at his father (it took him years to be able to say that, "I'm very angry at my father") for walking out on him and his mother, when he was a young boy. Richard became a business man, and eventually got back at his father by ruining him: he bought his company, took it apart and sold it. His shrink stupidly said he was cured, but we can clearly see he isn't. Like a serial killer who kills his father, and then feels the compulsive need to go on killing men who remind him of his parent, symbolically killing him again and again -- so Richard continues destroying companies, ruining what took years of hard work to build. He's still getting back at daddy, he's still mad as hell.

My theory is that maybe a masochist is someone who, at some point in his childhood, was hurt in his perception of himself as a sexual being, by someone important, someone with power over him (in Carol's case it was the nuns, in most people's life the most obvious choice would be their parents, but of course it can be someone else). This person told him he was sexually unattractive, not to be considered as a potential mate. Even if he didn't believe in this assessment; even if he had some inkling that this was an unacceptable and hurtful thing to say to anyone -- the fact remains that this powerful person said "In my opinion you're not sexual, you shouldn't be having sex, people shouldn't desire you". Thereby forbidding him from having sex, and of thinking of himself as a sexually desirable person, entitled to sexual feelings.

One could say that whatever parents/nuns think doesn't matter once you grow up. You become independent, and you start seeing yourself through your own eyes, not your parents'. You realize eventually that you don't have to fit into their idea of perfection to still be considered acceptable, or even ideal, by others. Most people aren't sex bombs, and they still get to have an active sex life. The ugly duckling doesn't have to turn into a swan, an ok duck does just as well. So why does a masochist continue to feel like an ugly duckling inside? Because he's still angry at his childhood oppressors, with a bitterness of hatred that dominates and shapes his sexual conduct.

Carol's method for liberating herself from the nuns' sexual repression, was to prove she could do exactly what the nuns wouldn't want her to do. The kind of sexual scenario that turned her on was one where, were the nuns to suddenly walk into the room as she was having "forbidden" sex, she would say "You see, I'm disobeying you, and you can't stop me." The imaginary nuns' reaction was what excited her, the man was just a means to an end.

In the case of a masochist, he needs to put on a scenario where, if his parents (or whoever the oppressors were) walked into the room, they couldn't punish him for having sex (as he expects they would) because in this fantasy he is not giving consent: he's being black-mailed, or coerced, or raped -- in some way forced to have sex against his will. This saves him from his oppressors' terrible punishment, that as a child he feared. Would he feel the need for this sexual game, to symbolically bring his oppressors into the room, and act out a scenario where he is released from their oppression and can do whatever he likes, if he weren't still angry at them?

I theorize that, though this anger is fully understandable and justifiable, if a masochist could, somehow, forgive his childhood oppressors, he would get over his anger. He would be released from the need to bring them symbolically to bed, and consequently his sex life would change. He would no longer need a fantasy scenario where he can't admit openly that sex is what he wants, because he would finally be able to feel relaxed as a sexual being, who doesn't have to disguise his sexual wants with allegations that he was forced.

Of course, even if I were right, it's probably more easily said than done. I don't subscribe to the belief that just understanding the mechanism of a pathology automatically makes it go away, the truth shall set you free, bla bla... If only it were always so. And perhaps people shouldn't be criticized for not being able to forgive their oppressors, when they are so right to be angry -- even if it could be established, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that to forgive would be in the interest of their mental health. Putting the blame on the victims for not being able to forgive is unfair, and is adding to their already heavy burden. But if forgiveness would do the trick, and is within the reach of the victim, that would at least be a rational course of action worth considering, rather than, I don't know, giving them something awful to smell every time they have an "impure" thought.